S5 - Week 1

Hi folks,

The first week of season 5 arena has come and gone. Here's how my ratings wound up
2v2 - 1544
3v3 - 1421 (yeah that's not a misprint)
5v5 - N/A

Drunkenclod, what' brought you to this lowly state? Weren't you solidly in the 1600's - 1700's and even hitting the 1800's bracket last season?

Yes, I was and there's 3 main reasons for the lower rating.

1) Gear - My gear is no longer even close to top of the line, in fact all 5 man and 10 man PvE gear is better then what I'm using and a lot of folks are wearing that. I don't normally PvE (more on that in a later article) and my play time is about 2 hours per night; not leaving much time to acquire gear. Lack of resilience is also a huge factor in 3's
1a) Also I've found lack of +HIT on gear to be extremely frustrating. Stuns not landing, judgments missed, GRRR.... All S5 gear is devoid of hit rating, the excption being misc items like neck, cloak, etc. You'll sacrifice +CRIT rating for it, but it is critical that you get back to the 5% hit cap for PvP. This will improve as I'm able to grind more honor for more gear.

2) Research - Every class has new spells, abilities and heck even the new DK class to work with. I have started looking into some of the new abilities for other classes and how to counter them, but research takes time AND then you need to practice it in the arena and BG's

3) We're rusty - Not doing PvP for a month has gotten us off our game. We've just started to mesh again, teaming up on stuns, focusing the correct targets at the correct time and working out new counters to opposing team makeup.

I fully expect this to work itself out in the upcoming weeks, but I will definitely need to start out with Savage Gladiator gear, and work my way up to hateful. It sucks because it's that much more honor and arena points to grind out but I won't be getting 1650-1750 without some better gear!